


Fortune Favors the Bold

by pingnova



Series: People of Letters [2]
Category: Alex Rider - Anthony Horowitz, Supernatural
Genre: American Sign Language, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, Hellhounds, Minor Castiel/Dean Winchester, Minor Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester, Mystery, Post-Scorpia Rising, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Season/Series 13, Sequel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 22:53:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17734184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pingnova/pseuds/pingnova
Summary: Sam thought that with his return to London, Alex Rider had put monsters and hunting behind. But Alex has never been predictable, and after the events that killed Jack Starbright, the teen spy is in America again and in a dark place. With Hellhounds on his tail it seems like he has little time left. But if Sam has ever been anything, it's determined to save who he can. Alex helped him once, now it's his turn to do some rescuing.





	Fortune Favors the Bold

**Author's Note:**

> Hello hello, long time no see. Complete kudos if you are still following this series and story somehow. I can't promise an update schedule because I don't have much of this written but I figured since I still get people commenting and kudo-ing the first fic, I should at least post what I have in the meantime. So here it is! I'm not 100% sure where it's going so this is a journey for us all! I will update tags as we go.

A phone began to ring again. This time it was Mick’s personal ringtone. He fished the cell out of his pocket and answered with a simple, “Mick.”

Sam watched Mick’s brow furrow, halfway between concern and disbelief. He set down the old tome he was reading. Book forgotten, Sam strained to hear who was on the line, but he only got garbled squawking. Mick, noticing Sam’s focus, held up a hand to indicate he’d share in a moment. Sam sat back, looking down at his book again, but didn’t read anything.

“Of course,” Mick finally said. “I’ll get back to you. Take care.” He tossed the phone onto the table and settled a hand over his mouth, face drawn.

“Well?” Sam prompted.

“You’ll never believe who that was.”

“Try me.”

Mick still stared at the phone, taking his time answering. Troubled thoughts swirled across his eyes. He finally removed his hand from his face to pocket the phone and sighed heavily. “It was Alex. Alex Rider. And he needs info on Hellhounds. More specifically, how to take them out.”

Several thoughts rushed through Sam’s head at once. Alex Rider, who was supposed to be safe back at his home in London, had just contacted them again. Alex was fourteen and more than capable of getting himself into trouble—and at times, getting himself out of it. Alex needed to kill a Hellhound. Hellhounds meant a crossroads deal.

Sam squeezed his eyes shut in realization and Mick made sympathetic noises as he came to the same conclusion. Alex had made a deal.

Mick had already called up something on his laptop and was in the process of relaying basic information about Hellhounds to Sam when he interrupted. If there was anyone who knew Hellhounds well, it was Sam Winchester. After his brother had been torn to shreds by one, he’d dedicated months to studying all things Hell, hounds included. That was compounded with the experience he’d gained in all his dealings with Hell since.

“Hellhounds can’t be killed by normal means. You need a demon-killing knife or an angel blade. They’re invisible, unless you’ve got glasses treated with holy fire, like we have. Where is he?”

“California, near Lake Tahoe.”

That was along Route 50 and would be a full day of driving if they didn’t stop. Did Alex have that long?

“Call him back,” Sam said. “He needs salt or goofer dust.”

“He called from a payphone…” Mick sounded pained to admit. “He said he needed to keep moving and that he’d call back tomorrow.”

“Try again anyway.”

Sam didn’t know it was possible, but he sat heavier in his chair as Mick redialed the payphone. It felt like all of his muscles had disengaged in shock. Alex was just a kid. Fourteen years and some months was too short a time to be alive, especially with everything he’d been put through in the past year alone. It had only been a few months since Sam had last seen Alex, what in the world could he have asked for that a demon gave him such a short amount of time before collection came calling?

Sam rubbed his face, like that would take the apprehension out of his body. Alex was involved in too much too soon. If Sam had never told him about the British Men of Letters, about hunting, would things have turned out this way? When Alex had left for London, it seemed like he’d be putting this all behind him.

With frustration, and maybe even a little premature grief, Sam wrapped up the guilt and heartbreak flooding his senses and tucked it safely inside. That wouldn’t help Alex now.

“No answer. He’s gone,” Mick supplied after the phone rung itself out a few times. He studied Sam’s hunched posture across the table. “Sam?”

“I’m fine,” Sam said, smacking his book shut with a quick humorless laugh. “It’s stupid. I just feel like I’ve failed, somehow. First, Cas dies. Then Mom… She’s gone. Dean’s a mess. Now Alex, the one thing I thought I did right. He’s going to Hell.”

“We can save him still, Sam,” Mick reassured with a lot more confidence than Sam felt. “That’s what you Winchesters do.”

“Maybe,” Sam said as he returned the book to its rightful place. Mick had taken the “saving people, hunting things” motto to heart. His unwavering faith in Sam and Dean was sometimes overwhelming, but Sam supposed he wouldn’t have betrayed the organization that had raised him on a whim. He really believed in what they did, in who they were.

With Alex’s damnation hovering like a black cloud over his thoughts, Sam didn’t feel very deserving of anything.

 

* * *

 

No call came from Alex the next day. Filled with nervous energy, Sam checked on his brother throughout the day. Dean had all but shut down since the events at the cabin in Washington. He didn’t talk, he hardly ate. It was so unlike Dean to turn down food. Especially things he liked—Sam had made a point to pick up the greasiest, meatiest diner fare to coax his brother into eating, but he’d take a bite for Sam’s sake and move on. Sam also made a point to stop buying beer, remembering what drink had done to their father in his grief. But Dean had taken that into his own hands and only seemed to make grocery runs to ensure he had a steady supply of alcohol at all times.

Sam pushed the door to room eleven open just enough to see that Dean wasn’t inside, then he moved knowingly to the open door of room twelve, which had been designated by Dean as Cas’ room. It was always prepped for the angel, Dean hoping that he’d one day stay with them in the bunker, but it was mostly untouched, given that Cas tended towards short visits and disappearing for long periods of time.

Standing in the doorway, Sam crossed his arms and exhaled heavily. Dean was asleep atop the comforter, headphones crooked on his head, Walkman clutched in his hand. Sam knew the mixtape he’d made for Cas was inside. The salt of dried tears slashed across his face harsher than any gash ever could, curving over the sharp planes of his sinking cheeks and graying eye bags.

Dean had been in that room every day, listening to the mixtape when he could, sleeping when he passed out from sheer exhaustion. Growing thinner and paler and more distant. When he wasn’t despondent, he was angry. When he was neither of those, he was usually intoxicated, like the only way he could face reality was through the distortion of beer goggles.

Sam’s heart twinged. He was angry with Dean, angry that he’d close himself off and stew, that he’d project his grief on Jack, who was practically born yesterday. That he’d refuse Sam’s attempts at helping him deal. That in doing that, he’d make himself unavailable to Sam, who needed someone—needed his _brother_ —when Sam’s best friend and mother had been suddenly taken from him.

With Eileen, Mick, and even Jody over the phone, Sam wasn’t totally alone. But what got Sam through anything was his brother. He wished Dean could get through his thick skull that Sam needed him, and that if Dean just gave Sam a chance, Sam would make sure Dean didn’t have to be alone in his grief.

Sam gently closed the door to room twelve and turned to leave. He managed to suppress the knee-jerk reaction to punch the person who appeared soundlessly in his personal space. It was only Jack.

“Jack,” Sam breathed, fists hovering for a strike he suppressed. It was such a Cas-like thing to do that Sam almost had to physically stop himself from saying the dead angel’s name instead.

Jack peered at the door to room twelve, brows furrowed with consternation, oblivious to Sam’s struggle. “Is Dean sick?”

Sam ushered Jack away from the door so they didn’t wake Dean. He needed all the sleep he could get. “No. I guess you could say he’s heartsick, but it’s not something there’s medicine for.”

Jack followed Sam into the library, where Mick still typed on his laptop. Ever the worker bee, he acknowledged Sam and Jack with a slight nod as they took a seat before returning to his task.

“Heartsick?” Jack repeated.

“It’s…” Sam thought about how to explain bereavement to someone who had only the most tenuous grasp on human emotion. “It hurts people emotionally when someone they love is gone forever.”

“Dean loved my father, Castiel,” Jack stated.

Sam said, “Yes.” Though he didn’t know where this was going. “I did too.”

“But not like Dean loved him,” Jack surmised. “Not like my mother loved me.”

“There are different kinds of love,” Sam supplied. “Cas was my best friend, my family. He and Dean were closer, he always said they had a ‘profound bond.’”

Sam caught Mick’s raised eyebrow over the edge of his laptop screen and couldn’t help the upward curl of his lips. He always thought it was a dramatic thing to say, but it was just like Cas to state so grandly what Dean could hardly admit. The smile wilted off his face when he remembered that Cas and Dean would never get a chance to see where that profound bond brought them.

“I think I understand,” Jack said, looking confused but determined to figure it out.

The slap of bare feet on cement announced Eileen, who made her way past them towards the kitchen, bundled in one of the Men of Letters robes. She returned soon after with an empty coffee mug and a scowl on her face.

“ _Good morning_ ,” Sam signed, adding a little wave and a fond smile.

“ _Bad_ ,” she signed, repeating for emphasis, turning the mug upside down on the table to indicate a lack of coffee. “ _Bad morning, run out of coffee_.”

“ _Write a list, I’ll buy some_.”

“ _OK_.” She smiled at Jack and Mick in turn and said out loud, for their benefit, “Good morning, guys.”

“Morning,” Mick said. Jack repeated the sign for morning as Sam had performed it, beaming when Eileen nodded in approval.

She made her way back into the kitchen, trailing her fingers across Sam’s shoulders as she passed. Sam watched her go, hyperaware of the touch, how it sent little jolts all the way to his core. He rubbed his chest absently, like he could hold onto the sensation and the warmth it inspired. When was the last time he touched someone affectionately? Or received physical affection?

Eileen was sweet, understanding, and she shared the hunter lifestyle. They exchanged more than a few dopey grins and flustered moments. She excited him in a way he hadn’t felt in years. He only wished she wasn’t coming into his life just as he lost two of the most important people in his family.

Jack lightly pounded his chest, fists crossed like an Egyptian mummy. “Love,” he muttered to himself.

“What’re you doing?” Sam couldn’t help but ask.

“This is the sign for love,” Jack explained, pressing his crossed arms against his chest like he was hugging himself. “It’s also the sign for grace.”

He expertly signed, “ _I have love_ ,” which was also interpreted, “ _I have grace_.”

“I didn’t know that,” Sam said out loud. It was an interesting linguistic parallel and he wondered how that settled in Jack’s mind. The nephilim struggled to understand the nature of love and how it and other human characteristics coexisted with his grace. Maybe a shared sign would offer him some insight.

He signed back, “ _How do you know ASL?_ ”

“ _I know all languages_ ,” Jack signed, his expansive gestures stressing the _all_. The signs were textbook and he was arranging his face right, but his expressions were otherwise flat and he lacked the empathetic body language. He rested his elbows on the table and signed to himself a few times, repeating words at random, watching his hands intently, almost like he was seeing the signs for the first time despite the fact that he knew what they meant.

Sam wasn’t surprised that the language was innate, it was a skill that Cas had also possessed. It must just be an angel thing. Eileen returned with a caffeinated Coke, a poor replacement for coffee, but she took what she could get.

“You guys were up all night again,” she said, rolling her eyes and smacking her forehead with the sign for “ _idiot_.” “Even Dean went to sleep.”

“I was working,” Mick said a little petulantly. He hadn’t understood the sign but seemed to catch the drift that it wasn’t flattering.

“I don’t need much sleep,” Jack dismissed.

“Uh,” Sam said eloquently. “I was worried about Alex.” And Dean. He feared closing his eyes, with what his dreams could bring up in response to the stress. Something classic, like the Cage. Or something recent—his mom, trapped in some post-apocalyptic wasteland with the being that made the Cage Hell, or Cas gone forever in a flash of bright white light. Something imagined even, like Eileen pinned to the ceiling, torn apart by flames. Alex, dragged to hell.

The reminder of the time—early morning—made the bags under his eyes ache. He rubbed at them and stifled a yawn. It had been over twenty-four hours since Alex’s call. Sam hoped that he was just somewhere without a payphone and not in bloody ribbons on a roadside somewhere.

“Eileen,” Mick said, waving to get her attention. “I have a haunting in Texas, if you’d like.”

While Eileen and Mick convened to talk about the possible hunt, Sam grabbed his laptop from the charging station at the end of the table and booted up the database search program. Mick had created it just for them. It used back doors into morgue databases across the country and compiled them into one searchable interface. It was a really amazing feat, and made hunting much faster.

Sam filled out the search terms: “male” “10-20 years” “white” “blonde” “brown” “5’~” “120-170”

He hesitated at the box that would narrow his criteria the most. It searched marks recorded in the coroner’s report, like wounds. If a Hellhound really got Alex, Sam knew all too well what those wounds looked like. He had to practically bag Dean up to keep him together when he’d first died.

He settled on the most distinct marks: “claw”

The screen blinked as the results loaded, thousands from across the states. He could alter the location later and see what some of the closest results were first.

On one hand, he wanted his search to be successful, so the unknowns would stop plaguing him. On the other hand, he wanted his search to fail—the last place he wanted to find Alex was in a morgue.

A knock echoed down from the front door. Sam glanced over at Eileen and Mick, who had stopped talking and now watched the door. Eileen shrugged in Sam’s direction and indicated that he should get it. It was his bunker.

Sam carefully undid the inner latch, gun in hand. He didn’t think they were expecting anyone, but only people who knew them well had the bunker’s location, so it was likely a friend. Leaving the door cracked, he peered outside, then went rigid in shock. He tossed the door completely open, shoving the gun in his belt, and broke into a wide grin.

Alex stood in the stairwell outside the door, dirty and hunched with exhaustion and the weight of a duffel, but he smiled back. It was small, watery, tacked onto his face like he’d lost his real smile long ago and only half-assed the replacement, but it was better than nothing. It was better than dead.

“Sam,” he said, so much relief packed into just his name.

“Alex!” Sam reached out to pat him on the shoulder, but it quickly turned into a full-bodied hug when he realized he wanted to know for real that the boy was really in one piece. He had to crouch a lot to get to Alex’s level. God, he was just a kid.

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” Sam said. “We were worried when you didn’t call.”

“Sorry,” Alex said into Sam’s shoulder. He hugged back a bit harder before pulling away. “I had to keep moving to stay out of reach of that Hellhound. I figured I might as well just see you in person.”

Sam gestured for Alex to enter then closed and locked the door. They were safe from Hellhounds in the bunker. He worked his jaw, the joy of seeing Alex wearing into exhaustion and anger. “Yeah, we’re going to talk about that.”

“Sure,” Alex said too easily, making his way down the stairs. He tossed the duffel to the side the moment he saw Mick and Eileen, making a beeline towards their little huddle around the laptop in the library. Eileen smiled politely and waved, while Mick tore himself away from his laptop for the first time in hours, betraying the true gravity of his welcome.

“You’re alive,” Mick said simply.

“Not for lack of anyone trying to off me,” Alex replied. He scrubbed a hand through his curls, knocking loose actual clods of dust, which disintegrated and floated around him in their slow descent towards the floor. “I swear every organization on the planet has a hit out on me. I haven’t stopped running since yesterday morning.”

“Who’s after you?” Eileen said, brow furrowed in concern and a bit of disbelief. It did take more than the average imagination to look at Alex as anything other than a typical kid.

“I’d like to know that too,” Sam added. “I was just looking for you in morgues. Why is anyone after you, much less a Hellhound? _Who_ is after you?”

Alex looked between Sam, who stood between him and the exit, and Mick, Eileen, and even a glance at Jack at the table. He bit his lip, hesitating. Dried mud clung to his pants, his white T-shirt was stained dark, and dirt painted his face a shade grayer than it really was, so Sam couldn’t tell if there were bags under his eyes or if the dirt just collected there.

“Alex,” Sam prompted in the tone Jody dubbed her “mom voice.”

Instead of answering, Alex gestured to Jack, who watched the proceedings with his usual curiosity. “Who’s this?”

“That’s Jack.” Sam stepped forward when Alex went rigid as a board at the name, not sure if the boy was preparing to attack or flee. “Alex? It’s okay, you can trust him. He’s not like Lucifer.”

“What?” Alex’s voice was higher with the effort it took to squeeze the words out of his mouth. Eyes trained on Jack, he addressed Sam. “Why would… Jack. Why would he be like Lucifer?”

“Because he’s my father,” Jack said. “But that’s not what you’re reacting to.”

Sam raised his eyebrows. Guess Jack was getting better at reading people. What was Alex reacting to?

“I don’t know who’s after me,” Alex said a little too loudly, still frozen facing Jack. Eileen shot Sam a helpless look and he realized she couldn’t read his lips from her position. He signed the gist to her. “Someone is following me, and I can hear the Hellhound, and…” He ducked his head and shook more dust out of his hair. In a strained voice, he said, “I’m sorry, I need a minute. Can I get cleaned up?”

In the middle of signing “Hellhound,” which was the sign for “dog,” an innocent gesture accompanied by a snap, like he was actually calling a dog to him, modified with the sign “hell,” Sam said, “Sure, Alex. Let’s get your stuff to the guest room and then I can show you the showers. Give me a second.”

“ _He looks like hot hell_ ,” Eileen signed.

“ _Yeah_.”

“ _If a Hellhound is after him, he made a deal. Can we help him?_ ”

“ _Yes_ ,” Sam replied firmly. There was no question about helping him. “ _The bunker is warded, we can kill it_.”

“ _OK_ ,” Eileen signed skeptically.

Alex watched the exchange closely, like he could suddenly understand ASL if he looked hard enough. Sam shot him a grin, hoping he couldn’t sense that they were talking about him. Mick had returned to his laptop and Jack sat still at the table, content to observe.

“It’ll be alright, Alex,” Sam said aloud. He picked up the duffel Alex had dropped and pointed toward the hall of bedrooms. “Let’s get you settled.”

Nodding, Alex turned to start walking. Sam followed, placing a hand carefully on Alex’s shoulder. He tensed, but didn’t shrug it off. Trying so hard to project his thoughts he almost felt psychic, Sam resolved to help, to save Alex as well as he could. He brought him into this, he’d get him out.

Before that, he had to know why Alex was here in the first place.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments feed the beast by the way. ;)


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